Fumbling towards fall

Well, we FINALLY seem to have gotten some decent summer weather here on the Wet Coast. Of course, it's September, but who's counting? I'm going to go ahead and use that as an excuse as to why I haven't posted in six months (or however long it's been - I'm too hot and lazy to go check).

Actually, now that I think on it a little, that's exactly why I haven't posted in so long. Not the good weather, I mean, just that I am hot and lazy.

Mostly lazy.

Anyway, just because I haven't posted doesn't mean we haven't been busy. We just haven't done a LOT of work on the house - aside from gardening, lawn mowing, cleaning up cat puke... you know, the usual. I still haven't set up my office beyond getting my desk in and my computer working (read above re: hot and lazy), but the War Department's office is looking really good - one more thing to put up that will be the subject of its own post, I'm sure - and the garage is a little more organized than it was. We even found time to clamber up the side of Mt. Doug with a friend from Toronto one particularly fine afternoon:

We also made these, which was fun:

Tasty, too.

Anyway, nobody comes here to read about our cooking (and if you do, you're probably going to be disappointed when you ask me to post recipes and then I never get around to it because, well, hot and lazy, remember?) so let's get to the meat of the post, shall we? The end of summer means that we are running out of time to do something about the horrendous state of our sunroom and get it all buttoned up before the rain comes back. (In case you forgot about the sunroom, check it out here.) Fortunately, Mike - the guy who installed our floors - has recovered from a recent bout of cancer (wish I was kidding, but hey - he's doing really well now) and was looking for some minor projects to get back into the swing of things.

As an aside, can I just say how utterly tickled I was to hear that he thought rebuilding our sunroom - something that would take us an absolute minimum of six months to do ourselves - was a minor project? No? Well, never mind, then.

Our part of the deal was that we would be doing the demo work ourselves, along with the eventual refinishing of the inside, including drywall (Joy!), paint, trim, and tiling the floor. With the windows coming in supposedly this week, it was time we got back to work and started taking out the crap.

This crap:

Yes, we've been using the sunroom as something of a storage room / project staging area. It just seems to be the place where all the stuff winds up that doesn't REALLY belong inside, but probably shouldn't get rained on. Before we could find places to store all that stuff, I had to finish ANOTHER project I was working on that was taking up most of the garage:

And before I could even START that project, I had to finish this other one.

Maybe it might be easier to just tackle these in order, eh? Matter of fact, there's probably just too much for one post, so maybe I'll just pick one topic for this one, and do up another post for the next one? Who knows, maybe it might even force me to post more often, right? Is this too many question marks for one paragraph?

Okay, forget the sunroom, forget the other project, let's back up the train and start over. Man, this being lazy thing just leads to a whole lot more extra work, doesn't it? Makes me wish I'd listened to what my mother told me all those years ago. ("What was that?" "I don't know - I wasn't listening.")

Right, so, I mentioned a while back (I think I did - I went looking for the post and wound up editing six others and forgetting what I was looking for so you'll just have to find it yourself) that we had these windows in the upstairs hall that let in all this light in the morning. Given the angle of the windows and the positioning of our bedroom, the light streams right into our bedroom door. In the winter, it's not so bad, but at certain times of the year, that light starts streaming in right around six in the morning which is too damn early - especially if it's the weekend and you're trying to sleep in. Not that we EVER sleep in. much.

Now NORMAL people could just close their bedroom door at night, but NORMAL people don't have whiny-ass cats that howl if they're deprived of our company for more than five minutes while we're at home. Of course, we could also come up with a system of curtains to block off those windows, but they're impossible to get to, and I have no idea how to rig up a system that would allow us to open and close the curtains (without use of a remote control, which would be AWESOME) once we did install them.

Anyway, our solution to this was, I believe, not only ingenious, but a pretty clear example of what sets us apart from NORMAL people.

Here are the windows in question, coincidentally enough, at about 7:30am one fine Saturday morning.

And here is not only a perfect example of the light cutting right across our bedroom door, but also the solution.

Yes, we installed a cat door in our bedroom door. We liked the solution so much, we put one in the War Department's office, too.

Anyway, it's taken me so long to get around to finishing this post that the September weather has turned cloudy and grey, and I'm not nearly so hot anymore. Still pretty damn lazy, though, so that's all for now. Tune in later this week for the saga of the bookcase!

It might be Broadmead, but it's still Victoria

It turns out that this neighborhood of ours, as awesomely fantastic as it is, isn't quite so far removed from the rest of this city as you might think. Oh, sure, we're perched up on the sunny side of Broadmead, with a view of Mount Doug and the Blenkinsop Valley. We've got a Garry Oak in the backyard and a few resident wildlife species:



On any given day, more people pass our house while walking their dogs than they do driving in their cars, and the neighbors have all, to a soul, been wonderful.

But it's still Victoria. Case in point:

We finally finished the War Department's office, which looks spectacular, thanks to all our hard work and some fantastic seamstressnessing (totally a real word) on the curtains by my mom:





Looks awesome, eh? Here they are closed, so you can revel in the majesty;



Anyway, finishing the office meant we could finally start moving stuff out of the garage, and putting it in the rooms it was all supposed to inhabit. Fortunately, nothing else had been damaged beyond repair by the mice (leave it to those little bastards to destroy the most expensive thing in the garage) and we got the last of our furniture out. This left nothing in the garage except tools, proper garage stuff, and a whole schwack of things that we wanted to get rid of anyway, but couldn't actually get to with all the other crap in the way. For example, this thing:





That's a canoe with a large, ugly patch, several small holes, and a completely rotten keel. (It also may or may not have smelled strongly of mouse pee. Maybe.) We were originally going to try to get it fixed, but the guy who was going to fix it inexplicably disappeared. Like, not answering his phone, and he doesn't appear to live/work at the address he gave us. Which, again, if you've ever tried to hire a contractor in Victoria, isn't actually all THAT uncommon in this town...

At any rate, the War Department finally decided that storing the damn thing in the (probably vain) hope that we'd eventually find someone who could fix it for less than the cost of a new one was, well, hopeless. We picked a fine Saturday morning, and started hauling all the stuff out of the garage and stacking it in the driveway so we could clean it off, identify the stuff we wanted to get rid off, and reorganize the remainder.

As it so happens, that particular Saturday happened to be the day that our neighbors two doors down decided to have a garage sale. This proved something of a distraction when I had to inform an elderly couple picking over our old hockey sticks, paddles, and a roll of carpet underlay that we weren't actually selling anything. To reduce the amount of embarrassment this misunderstanding could cause, I made up a sign that said "NOT a garage sale - sorry!" and, after holding it up to ward off another couple that had stopped their car in front of the house, propped it up at the end of the driveway.

It was right about then that it occurred to us that maybe we could take advantage of the garage sale's proximity and the increased traffic to get rid of a few things and save ourselves the trouble of loading up the truck. After all, in the old house, we had often disposed of unwanted furniture and electronics by simply putting it out on the curb with a "Free" sign attached.It's actually something of a local and well-known tradition in Victoria. Hell, before Amy and I moved in together, she got rid of a hideous, orange plaid couch using this exact method. A hideous, orange plaid PULL-OUT couch that smelled like cat pee. Students - what are you gonna do?

Anyway, we decided to test our luck, and dragged the canoe down to the end of the driveway, positioning it between the Not a Garage Sale sign and the end of the driveway. I stuck a free sign on it, and went back to organizing the garage.

Now, before I say anything else, let me say this: I am not going to use any hyperbole, exaggeration, or overstatement. This is absolutely, positively, 100% true:

The canoe was gone - GONE - in less than twenty minutes. I didn't even have to help load it.

This town, I swear.

So... wanna buy a house?

No, not our house. Well, not our current house.

This one is on the market again.

Doesn't look like they've done much to it, aside from destroying the exterior with a whole bunch of ugly landscaping, and wasting a lot of perfectly good cedar turning the downstairs workshop into a laundry room. And given that what they're asking isn't a whole lot more than what they paid US for it, I don't think they're being motivated by any potential capital gains, if you know what I mean.

I'm tempted to go and take a tour if they have an open house, but the War Department has no interest in it at all. Something about preferring the memories over whatever travesty has been foisted upon it since we gave it up. Actually, I can see her point.

But anyway, I'm sure nobody comes here for updates on the old shed. You want to know what's up with the new digs, right? Well, we're mired in that unbelievably interminable stretch of paint, fill, sand, paint, fill, sand, sand, vacuum, beer, sand, fill, paint, etc. Which is a pretty accurate summary of doing the trim in the War Department's office/our new guest room.

I would give you a preview of what it looks like but a) it looks a lot like my office, only slightly bigger and slightly brighter, and b) I just painted the window sills and had to erect a cat barricade to keep the little bastards from jumping up onto the fresh paint:



And before some smart-ass (Dad) asks why I didn't just close the door to keep them out, it's because the door frame is also wet, and I haven't hung the door yet.

But the floor is done, the new curtains should arrive sometime this week (thanks, Mom!), the trim is almost, almost, almost finished, and with a little luck and some more work, we should be moving furniture in this weekend and getting our respective rooms together.

Oh, and speaking of flooring, we've got about 150 sq. ft. or so left of Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron engineered hardwood flooring - anyone want some? Cheap?

Man, where did THAT month(s) (and a bit) go?

Seriously, what happened to the last two months? It seems like I just updated this thing yesterday, and then I look at the date and realize I've left all my reader(s) hanging for two months.

And then I go and drop a relatively short post on you anyway... Uh... sorry?

Where were we anyway? Looks like we had just put in the stove and started messing around with the outdoors. Well, the stove is pretty much the same (still sheer awesome), so why don't we get caught up on the garden then?

The also bad news is that I don't have much in the way of photo-editing software installed on this computer yet, so I can't do my usual before-and-after presentation, but I CAN post some pictures of how the yard looks now, and tell you how it got that way.

I should also take this opportunity to point out that the outside - pretty much all of it - is really the War Department's demesnes. I just do the heavy lifting and some of the less-precise chores, like mowing the lawn. She's the one with the landscaping background, and she also does NOT share my complete and abiding hatred of the outdoors. (Actually, it's not the outdoors I hate per se, but the creatures that inhabit it. Especially the wasps. Actually, specifically the wasps. I really hate wasps.)

Where was I?

Right, the wasps. I mean, the yard! The yard. Yeah.

Okay, I'm never going to get through this post without resorting to my second favorite method of presentation: the list!

Things we've done so far:

• Finished digging out the roots from the huge cedars we cut down at the front of the house; fixed the irrigation pipe I busted while digging out said roots; planted some heathers and rhododendrons instead; and covered the rest of the bed with bark mulch.
• Dug up the turf from the shallow spots on the lawn; filled in the shallow spots with topsoil; and reseeded the now-not-shallow spots.
• Removed the stupid-looking stones from around the front bed by the big rock; weeded out all the dandelions, foxglove, and primulas; planted some heathers, rhodos, and the azalea we rescued from the backyard; and covered it up with some decent soil and a top coat of bark mulch.
• Took out a strip of flower bed along the stone wall beside the sunroom; and reseeded it as lawn.
• Cut down a couple more cedars from along the side fence; yanked out some dead or decrepit plants that really weren't doing well there; planted a "Japanese Black Dragon" wysteria in their place (which I picked out solely because of the name, by the way); and it's still an ongoing project, so lots more to do along the fence there.

Oh, what the heck, here are the "before" shots of the yard:







And the "afters":











Here are all the stones from around the beds in the front yard, now carefully piled up on the stump where the dolphin fountain used to be (a VAST improvement if you ask me - both in terms of replacing that god-awful fountain, and in terms of moving the haphazard, random assortment of rocks from around the beds in the front):



We also...

• Built a mason bee box and put it on the side of the house. (Absolutely NONE of which was my idea, by the way. Bees, wasps, butterflies - all just brothers from different mothers if you ask me. Evil flying nasties that'll sting you as soon as look at you.) Anyway, it's kinda cute, eh?

• Made a nice home for a couple of passing ducks. Okay, so we didn't really do anything specific to attract them, they just showed up one morning and have been dropping by for visits fairly regularly ever since.

• And, lest I forget, I also drove all the way up to McBride to pick up a painting that, it turns out, didn't fit into my car. Fortunately, not only was the consolation prize a rather spectacular photograph:

But mon pere was gracious and awesome enough to drive all the way down FROM McBride the following week to personally deliver the original painting as well, which looks absolutely amazing and really helps to finish off the bear pit:



Anyway, we're currently working on Amy's office/the guest room, and I've already finished the floor, but it's late and I'm tired, and I'm sure everyone would rather I post again this weekend than waste EVERYTHING in one post now, right?

Right?

Hello? Anybody still reading this?


Bueller?